Fairytale
by slashmarks
Summary: Hermione Granger knows life is not a fairytale, but she still hopes. Oneshot. Femslash, femmeslash, girlslash, whatever you want to call it, but nothing explicit. The angst is only slight.


_A/N: So, yeah. Surprise! I'm alive! If there are any mistakes in this, with the raven statue outside the tower, for instance, just tell me, because several of the later books are half a continent away from me at the moment and I can't exactly check. _

It's all been done before. Life is not a fairytale.

Hermione knows this; she knows that love is nothing special, nothing new. She knows that this feeling she gets when watching the _one_ is not unique, knows that a million and more have felt this way before her, that she herself has felt it and will feel it again. She knows she will forget this so-called love by this time next year, knows because that's how it's always been before.

She knows that life is not a fairytale, knows that someone like this could never be interested in her, the bookworm, the girl too shy to wear tight robes or ask someone to go to the Yule Ball with her, the girl who wears shapeless clothing and keeps her hair long and bushy so it can hide her face. She knows that doesn't happen in real life. She knows that life is not a fairytale, and Fleur Delacour probably isn't even interested in _woman_, for the love of God, and she can hardly be called a woman herself. Just a smart, but otherwise unremarkable girl. She tells herself it doesn't matter, because she doesn't know Fleur Delacour anyway; what she holds to herself and dreams about and daydreams about is just a fantasy.

Still, she can't stop herself from watching. Watching can't do any harm, right? So she watches and tries not to let her friends- her oblivious male friends- notice when her eyes follow the part-veela's swaying hips as she walks out of the hall, or when she skips out on studying the night before a test for the first time in her life to go for a walk near where she's heard Ravenclaw's dorms are, where the Beauxbatons students are staying, in hopes that maybe, just _maybe_, life is a fairytale after all, and she'll meet Fleur and something will happen, even though she doesn't let herself imagine what that something might be, isn't sure she _can_ imagine. She's had things like this for girls before, things she always calls crushes when she isn't right in the confusing, tangled midst of one, but she's never gone through with them, and isn't sure what she _would_ do if she had the chance.

So she watches, and she knows, and one day, just your average breakfast, with toast and marmalade and a school book propped up so she can study and eat at the same time, an owl she knows belongs to the school flies overhead and drops a letter on her place with the words _Hermione Granger_ written in beautiful, loopy handwriting on it. That breakfast, like every other, she doesn't let herself hope, for just an instant, that _maybe..._ She just opens the letter. Opens it, and reads.

She reads, and she smiles when she comes to the closing, smiles with newly perfect teeth, because life might not be a fairytale, but maybe, just _maybe_, there are happy endings after all.

She excuses herself from the table, laughing softly when she gets out of the hall at just how _oblivious_ Harry and Ron are, and walks up to Ravenclaw tower feeling like the floor is made of clouds, feeling like the entire fourth year Charms class has just cast a hundred Cheering Charms on her in unison, because her happy ending is right in front of her, and she can taste it from here.

At the door to Ravenclaw tower, she pauses to admire the view, because the raven statue has all sorts of details she never noticed before when walking past, and the future looks so bright from here that she feels like she needs to stop and get her bearings before she can keep going on.

The door opens, and a blonde steps out. Looks at her questioningly, asking without words, _Will you?_

"Yes." The word is soft, escapes from her lips like a ghost, but the girl hears it, and beams at her, then leans forward to kiss her. And as two girls' lips unite, she knows that the future is brighter than it's ever seemed before.

Life is not a fairytale, but this is her happy ending all the same. Because Hermione Granger does not love Luna Lovegood, but she knows she will, sometime soon. In that instant, she can see the future, brighter and clearer than it ever seemed in a crystal ball. She can taste it on Luna's lips.


End file.
